


千里之行 (Start with the First Step)

by orphan_account



Category: Mulan (1998), Twisted Princess (Disney Fanart)
Genre: Content Notes Inside, Deconstruction, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Post-Canon, Yuletide 2011
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-25
Updated: 2011-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-28 04:14:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/303621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No legend can be created in a vacuum.</p>
            </blockquote>





	千里之行 (Start with the First Step)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ryuutchi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ryuutchi/gifts).



> Warning/content note: Brief mention of the death of a minor character. I would not call this deathfic.

Outside the walls of the Forbidden City a fire breaks out: someone leaves their mushrooms overlong in a cooking pot.

Inside the Hall of Union a woman and her lover live. They are surrounded by ceremonial items: a clock that measures the time from breakfast to supper, the seals that approve decrees, and the gifts of those who wish favor from their emperor. Each day the door opens once, when the clock strikes thirteen times, and closes. A sanctioned queue are allowed in to ask the advice of China's saviors. The number of authorized people who have seen the War of the False Emperor diminishes year by year, until most of the hopefuls are courtiers collecting glimpses of the legends of the Forbidden City. These courtiers are as rooted under the golden walls as chrysanthemums in pots. It is understood they do not intend to ever leave without palanquins and guards to keep the populace away from them.

Everywhere the news goes, the fire is a fire.

The woman, though, the woman leaps in stature from house to house. Although Mulan watches the clock and examines the seals and thinks traitorous thoughts of the courtiers, the little knot of approved visitors keeps asking to see her rusting armor, or her recipes for duck's blood soup, or what to name daughters who will be named Hua and Mei and Qing no matter what she says, and somehow she never learns what she has become outside the walls.

\- -

The village of Shaonian sent eighty of its men to aid the rightful Emperor. One man— no, a boy— crept off in the middle of the night to Shan Yu because he was afraid. Although everyone once knew of this, there are things it is respectful not to remember. It is written in the annals somewhere in the Forbidden City that a man of Shaonian defected, and that is enough.

The boy who was never there had a daughter named Wei Xu, who plays with dice someone donated to a cursed house and loves treats her mother can no longer afford to buy, her husband buried somewhere out under the snow white as noodle flour. His mother owns a large house the townspeople conveniently forgot to seize, and it is here that Shaonian holds meetings and hosts travelling storytellers that Xu is not supposed to listen to. One day, she listens to the unfamiliar rush of the storyteller's voice as he recounts for the village the fire they witnessed saturating the sunrise in orange and the woman who started it.

"Mother," she asks, after, "Is it true that the golden dragon started the fire?"

"It did," the mother says, continuing to scrub the spotless floor. "You heard the news-teller, I know you did."

"But isn't gold the Emperor's color?"

"It did such a wicked thing because its mistress was usurping the right of the Son of Heaven," she says. The washcloth stops moving, then it progresses a hand's breadth across the stone, then the mother throws it into a corner and thins her lips at the girl who carries the blood of Wei Renjian. "Its mistress is an evil princess who stole her father's sword and has never stopped killing since, and you do not need to know any more to do your sewing."

"But she's dead."

"She is a perversion of the ability to beget life, and the Emperor's soldiers will find her and gift her a final death soon," the mother continues to Xu, with the sing-song that usually accompanies poems recited verbatim from her memory. "Listen to your elders. Do what you're supposed to do."

"Could she kill the Huns for us, Mother?"

"You heard the news!"

Xu thinks of a girl who rode with the Huns and took their arrows in ecstasy so she could prove she was one of them. It is so strange that anyone would defy their Emperor like that, but it is not difficult to believe, with the havoc that always erupts just close enough for a messenger to bring news, his horse foaming with the freshness of the tales he bears, whenever one of Shaonian's veterans begins muttering too many details of the war.

\- -

The emperor looks at the array of faces around him, a few of whom remember what it is like to fight a war, and more who remember what it is like to fight the amorphous swarm of royal attendants to end up in a room like this, and coughs. It is the kind of cough that will heap bounty upon the adviser who most accurately interprets it.

The man who proposed the infiltration campaign holds up a placating hand. "It is necessary," he says. "China is not stable enough to deal with an upheaval that could result if all our daughters think they can go to war."

"There are families to save," someone else says. His sons eat their vegetables and take their schooling in the shadow of the Inner Wall, true, in the least vulnerable part of China.

"We are only sending soldiers to 'protect' the countryside," another argues. "You are our Emperor, and you have a position that only you can aspire to. Only you are wise enough to save them all from themselves."

The emperor can see a hall from outside a window where a woman lives, a woman who he has never seen since the night she broke into his palace.

"Go on," he says.

\- -

One of the veterans of the war, one particularly willing to complain about his lack of pension from the government for his sacrifice, leaves the village and does not come back. Xu knows this because she sees the speck of him becoming smaller and smaller as she swings on rope strung from a tree in her family's garden. The new storyteller, who is now quite familiar to the people who visit her mother's house, rubs his hands. "I have details that no one else has been given, for I saw him die out on my daily walk," he proclaims. "Come, let us have some food, and you will hear all of it."

"The soldiers are going to report on it anyway," one of the men in the back grumbles. Lin Yong never donates food to village celebrations. "Why shouldn't we wait for them?"

The storyteller's scandalized face is half-hidden by the door Xu hides behind. "They'll give you a short piece," he says, "but I will tell you the interesting parts of what happened."

He does. The woman who never stops killing, he says, took him on the riverbank and fed him to the waters after her blade was satisfied. He details her dress, the unnatural dangerous beauty of it, the blood painting her lips, and Xu shrinks back in visceral horror. The men in the village, after they have had more cups of clear liquid than their wives are happy with, try to one-up each other with grisly stories of ending their enemies, but Xu doesn't think any of those men with crow's feet around their eyes when sober would actually do such a thing.

No one would do such a thing.

The soldiers, when they arrive, are unsmiling and brief about the veteran's disappearance.

\- -

The legend in the Hall of Union requests an audience with the Emperor one day. Apparently one of the younger and more foolish boys took a dare to ask her about one of the myriad versions of her floating around the country. The man on the throne, his fingers shaky on the parchment bearing the blood-red seal of the Fa family, grants it because she used to say truthful things to him, even when he had no desire to hear them.

After the audience the main door to the Hall is barred and locked. Food is sent through a side door designed for pets and servants. In his reign the brass-knobbed door is only opened again twice. The first time, the courtiers look away as a man's body exits, the pallbearers stepping over the doorway and never turning back. The second time to allow a doctor in to see to Mulan's leg when she breaks it trying to drop out of the eaves.

It remains closed even when she has healed enough to make another attempt, this one successful. There are proprieties to maintain, and it would not aid stability for any of the things Mulan represents to be known to be loose.

At first the escapee, thinking she endures as the Fa Mulan who saved the city while demonstrating filial piety, tells the farmers she tries to hitch rides from her name. Some of them laugh. Some of them wonder why a woman unlucky enough to share a name with an undead demon has not changed it, for although time never seemed to pass in the Forbidden City, Mulan's face has felt it go by. One of them recognizes the oblivious candor in the pride with which she introduces herself, spits, and runs for help, and in the epithets shouted at her as they chase her she learns what has become of the girl who left home to win the war.

She steals a horse— it cannot believe in stories, only the surety she touches its flanks with and the beauty of the songs she croons in its ears— and gives a false name. Famine rides all around her, the fields the Hun invasion burned still fallow in many places, and she rides behind the tales that have been told of her. No one remembers one more refugee for the soldiers who follow her along the road.

The villages string behind her. Shanjing, Daizong, Luzhou, Shaonian. One night she stops behind a house because she sees a grave, badly hidden under a cherry blossom tree. It seems as good a place as any to try to steal some grain.

She only makes it halfway through a doorway before she freezes. A girl stares at her, eyes round as coins, and croaks out of a throat tight with fear, "Are you here to take me?"

Mulan feels the hunger that goes beyond her gut. "Please," she whispers. "If you give me some millet, just for one night, I'll tell you what really happened to a twisted legend."

**Author's Note:**

> Title: 千里之行始于足下 (not meant as its literal translation)
> 
> All kinds of feedback are welcome and appreciated.


End file.
